Quote Originally Posted by Cavguy View Post
Some issues with Dr. Lyall's/LTC Wilson's thesis:

Theory:

1) Given the changes in regime types, international order, information distribution, public goods, and international laws over the same time period (1918+), why do you think Mechanization is the causative factor of declining COIN performance?

2) What was the rationale of counting settlements as losses? If they are coded as wins, does the data result change? What was the criteria of defining a win/loss/draw?

3) Why would a foraging army, taking goods from the populace, gain cooperation from the same? If you steal my stuff, I'm certainly not giving you intel willingly, unless you suggest coercive methods are used. Why do foragers obtain better information, as you suggest? Or are you suggesting mechanization also reduces use of coercive intelligence gathering?

4) Are certain COIN tactics used in the 19th Century still usable today? The campaigns against the Native American tribes were extremely successful COIN, but certainly the methods used are taboo in the 20th century. Does this affect your argument?

5) Is a better determinant of mechanization's effect on a force the assessment of the opponent it will likely fight? If one has a largely mechanized force, he envisions fighting a similar enemy in decisive battle. Therefore doctrine and training align against the most dangerous threat, which is usually conventional. Therefore heavily mechanized armies are less likely to study/practice for COIN. This is far more plausible than foraging/logistics as an explanation for any declining COIN performance associated with vehicles.

Case Study:

1) If General Petraeus commanded the 4th ID and General Odierno the 101st in OIF1, would each division's performance have been the same?

2) Why are officers, identically educated and often assigned between light and heavy units during careers, allegedly worse at COIN when paired with vehicles in OIF?

3) How do you explain the major COIN success of 3d ACR in Tal Afar (2005), the most mechanized unit of its size in the Army? What about 1/1 AD in Ramadi (2006-2007)? There are more examples, but these are the most striking.

4) How does the performance of the light 82d Airborne in OIF 1 contrast with the 101st AA, and the performance of 4th ID with the similarly configured 1AD in 2003-2004? What about the performance of later mechanized formations?

5) Why did some units of the 101st turn in a mediocre to poor COIN performance during 2005/2006? What changed in 2004-2005 that so altered the COIN ability of this division? (Think COL Steele)

6) What are the policy implications of your paper? How should the Army configure its units for COIN? Should Armor be reduced or eliminated from the battlefield?

7) Are mechanized units more or less able to adapt to an insurgent environment than light units? Why? What recent performance data bears this out?

8) How does the counterguerrilla performance of 11ACR in Vietnam align with your argument?

Just a few of the issues raised in our response, which I can send PM to those interested but not publish yet.
Neil,

A lot of great questions, especially the line of questioning that hits at the change in international norms. One point - regression analysis is aggregated analysis, and so it can't answer to individual observations such as your Petraeus vs. Odierno OIF I thought experiment. You can always find observations that don't conform to the regression analysis.

I think your question #6 is the most important, and in terms of causality, I think that mechanization serves as a proxy for institutional identity, a sort of "if you build it, they will come" hypothesis. In other words, if you build a heavy force, it becomes easier to adopt a heavy mindset, and so it's not the mechanization that hurts, but rather, the doctrine (or more appropriately, doctrinal oversight/bias) that hurts COIN performance, which comes back to your line of questioning about education.

I think that COL Gentile gets it exactly right in his comment here, http://smallwarsjournal.com/blog/200.../#comment-4026, where he talks about educating for COIN instead of training for COIN. As much as people (not so much on SWJ) buy off on the false dichotomy that is often portrayed in the Gentile vs. Nagl debate, I think that looking how to determine how to best educate our force will help us to have our cake (conventional) and eat it too (COIN). In this light, mechanized vehicles are put back into their place as a tool and not the master as the "mechanization hurts COIN" bumper sticker makes it out to be.